As we enter 2025 with the AI panic dying down, it’s clearer than ever that the use of the technology alone does not produce impactful creative work.
Although the visual quality of some tools has become incredibly impressive, there are limitations to the output without skilled human intervention. Generated content often has a distinct 'AI look and feel' and lacks the depth and substance of great creative work.
However, when properly integrated into existing VFX pipelines, AI can streamline processes and enhance visual storytelling possibilities. The key? Having a solid VFX team in place with the knowledge, experience and skill needed to harness the technology to produce high-end results. After all, AI is just a tool and how well it’s used will make all the difference in the coming months.
ECD Justin Blyth elaborates, “At Ambassadors, we’ve merged our decades of VFX expertise with AI to speed up processes and unlock fresh creative possibilities. For us, AI is simply another tool, allowing us to push creative boundaries and deliver stunning visuals without losing our signature artistry. AI is an integrated part of our pipeline, which still (and will always) require creatives and traditional VFX artists to output visuals matching these standards of excellence.
We use AI to quickly add or remove seasonal elements – like snow or leaves – and slash costs compared to practical or CG solutions. We also age & de-age actors, allowing directors to explore entirely new narratives. And by training AI on athletes, clothing and footwear for brands, we can generate custom imagery for social, retail, and e-commerce at a fraction of the cost of traditional photo shoots.”
Ageing and de-ageing
As Justin mentions, one of the use cases for integrating AI and VFX is ageing and de-ageing — the ability to make an actor appear authentically older or younger, opening up levels of visual storytelling that were previously not possible.
Our recent work for Kruidvat shows this in action beautifully. In their latest campaign, we see the main character, Lies, at different stages of her life using Kruidvat products, from adolescence to motherhood. By ageing and de-ageing a single actor, the audience becomes fully immersed in the storytelling and its authenticity.
VFX Supervisor, Sil Bulterman, shares more about the process of bringing the story to life:
“During the shoot we were mindful to use clearly visible facial angles of the actress, since we were going to use a combination of different machine learning/ai de-ageing tools, that would need to be able to pick up all the facial features and movement.
Playing around to achieve the correct blend of each tool, to achieve the desired level of de-ageing while maintaining recognisability, we ended up with a slightly softer facial structure, subtly shifting the jawline, eyes and cheeks. The use of AI tools allowed us to give our actress a completely natural looking, de-aged face in a relatively short timeframe.”
The rapid development of machine learning enhanced tools are quickly becoming an indispensable tool in the VFX toolbag, opening up new possibilities for the VFX artist."
AI is not going anywhere, and so the future of creative work is not if AI will be used but how well it will be used — and by integrating AI with VFX pipelines driven by expert teams of artists, the possibilities are endless.
Credits:
Brand: Kruidvat
Strategy and concept: DDB Amsterdam and DDB Retail
Production company: Annomann
Director: Jeroen Annokkeé
Offline edit: Marc Bechtold
VFX/AI: Ambassadors
You can see other examples of ageing and de-ageing in use in our previous work for Apple TV featuring Natalie Portman playing a woman at different ages, and for G-Star Raw showing the enduring love of denim through men aging with their jeans.
